Everything about Docker I learned from Minecraft

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I’ve been experimenting with Docker a LOT recently. The container mechanisms and structure make a lot of sense to the DevOps side of me, and I wanted to put this knowledge to good use. My daughter’s cyber-school wanted a Minecraft server and I offered to help. With a little bit of work and my handy Azure subscription, we got a great Minecraft server running in the cloud that I can redeploy anywhere I need. Here’s how I set it up. Continue reading →

WebForms – How do I Unit Test Thee?

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I’m a huge fan of unit testing… its my safety net, allowing me to make changes to an application without fear that I’ve broken core functionality. With my favorite web development framework, ASP.NET, its been very difficult to build unit tests for the server-side code that you write for the Web Forms UI framework.

I decided to do some research and start doing something about that.

Continue reading →

The Case of the Old NuGet Dependency Installation

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Detective Fritz

I recently got an email from a friend looking for some help with a NuGet package installation issue. It seems that with the Visual Studio 2015 version of NuGet, the wrong version of dependencies the package author is getting installed. This is related to a policy decision about NuGet to make it’s default behavior more conservative about which versions of packages it would install. In this post, we’ll walk through troubleshooting this package and discuss what the author can do to improve their consumers experience as well as how the package consumer can use NuGet to install the dependency versions they want. Continue reading →

Back to the Future with a Tag Helper

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In October, I gave a presentation to the .NET DC User Group on the night before Marty McFly was due to arrive in 2015 according to the movie Back to the Future Part 2. This was a great opportunity for me to put together a simple demo that I could run with ASP.NET 5 and show something easy to digest. In this case, I put together an HTML version of the time circuits from Doc’s Delorean time machine.

That’s easy… a set of date displays on a grey background. I broke out a copy of Visual Studio 2015 and set to work making one row work in CSS and HTML. Continue reading →

Security vs. Customer Service

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Every day you see it: a new company that has been hacked… all of their customer accounts are sprayed across the dark side of the internet. Some account records contain passwords, some contain credit card numbers, and even a few will carry checking account numbers. Its a devastating event for any company, and one that will cost some organizations their business life.

With these high-profile incidents in the news, it has finally come to the attention of the suits in the C-suite that they need to make security a priority. Stop at nothing, do not let hackers get into their systems. No unauthorized access to ANYTHING! This is a great stance, in theory… but some directions can be taken too far, and policies set on things that really have no purpose in being protected with ‘federal government grade security’